McConnell: From Moscow Mitch to Beijing’s Bozo

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Or, if you prefer, China’s Chum.

In today’s New York Times, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell provided a quote that may be the quintessence of McConnellism. Asked about whether he’d support President Biden’s infrastructure proposal, McConnell replied:

“If it’s going to have massive tax increases and trillions more added to the national debt, it’s not likely.”

And there, in one admirably succinct sentence, is the reason why the Republicans are the party of national decline. Any major new governmental initiative perforce will either be paid for with tax increases, or increase the national debt, or be offset by cuts to existing programs. In one sentence, McConnell has ruled out the first two options, leaving unsaid that his preferred option, and that of his party, is to slash benefits and social services. That’s why McConnell considers his job to be killing all new initiatives, if and only if he can’t pay for them by reducing his fellow Americans’ living standards.

Just in case anyone was in doubt, McConnell has now made clear that the yearly Infrastructure Week follies of the Trump presidency weren’t just Trump’s fault (due to the president’s insistence on requiring states and localities to pick up 90 percent of the tab). They were also McConnell’s fault, and that of the whole damned Republican Party, which thought that even the remaining 10 percent was way too much. Had Republicans been like this 170 years ago, they wouldn’t have ponied up enough to fund the Pony Express.

It wasn’t always thus. The most celebrated senator from McConnell’s Kentucky is still Henry Clay, who dominated the Senate for much of the first half of the 19th century. Clay’s defining passion was what he called “internal improvements”—using federal funds to create and improve the nation’s rather primitive roads, canals, and bridges. Internal improvements quickly became the gospel of the Whigs (the party Clay headed), and when the Whigs went under in the 1850s, the gospel was passed on to its successor, the new Republican Party.

Support for internal improvements was anything but consensual. The South (that is, the white male elites who controlled its politics and economy) fiercely opposed the expenditure of federal funds on just about anything save the occasional retrieval of a runaway slave. It was only when the South seceded that the first Republican president (Lincoln) and the newly Republican (and devoid of Southerners) Congress enacted the internal improvements of which Clay could only have dreamed: a transcontinental railroad, land grant colleges, the Homestead Act.

They may both be Kentuckians, but McConnell is the anti-Clay. More R&D? Phooey! Upgraded manufacturing? Feh! Clean energy? Blecch! Living wages? Hell no!

Nonetheless, McConnell’s nay-saying will surely lead to a rise in national pre-eminence: China’s.

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